And in that moment, offering sixty dollars where thirty thousand had been demanded, I was not being cheap, whatever Bristol screamed to the ceiling.

I was, for the first time, refusing to fund a lie with the money I had bled for.

The number did not matter.

The no mattered.

And upstairs, heavy footsteps had begun to pound across the floorboards.

I have thought about why the first no is always the hardest, and why, once it is finally said, the second and third and hundredth come so much more easily — because it is a strange feature of boundaries that they seem impossible right up until the instant you set one, after which you cannot understand why you waited so long.